"Webbiquity" is about being everywhere online when and where buyers are looking for what you sell. It's what I help B2B clients achieve through a coordinated strategy of SEO, search marketing, social media, brand management, content marketing, and influencer relations, supported by the right marketing technology.

Despite constant change on the search landscape—personalization, localization, Caffeine, Google Instant—SEO is not dead, not even close. It is certainly changing though. How can you stay current and adjust? What basic SEO factors and techniques remain important? What common mistakes should you avoid? How do realtime platforms like Twitter affect search results? What trends should you be watching? How do you optimize non-text content such as video? Is duplicate content always bad? What does Matt Cutts have to say about all of this?

Get the answers to these questions and more here in 40 of the best blog posts and articles on SEO strategy, tactics, trends and insights so far in 2010.

Yes, Rand Fishkin and SEOmoz are cited several times here (not surprising for a “best of SEO” post). No, he isn’t paying me. At least not yet.

The brilliant and always entertaining Ian Lurie provides an amusing yet practical guide to separating true SEO pros from fakers and wannabes. Example (question #9): “Do you have partnerships with major search engines? If they answer ‘Yes,’ make sure they’re not calling you from prison: They’re a total fraud. Any credible SEO will make a sound like they just choked on a lemon and explain that no one has a partnership with a major search engine.”

Catherine Juon details five considerations to keep in mind when building a new site, such as keeping your design simple and writing “findable” content. Though nothing here is rocket science, it’s amazing how many sites still fail these tests.

Extensive list of common SEO mistakes made in strategy, market research, keyword research, content development, URLs, link building, coding and more. As David puts it, “If you’re a web designer who thinks that ‘good CSS = SEO,’ a writer who thinks that ‘good content = SEO’ or a developer who just thinks ‘SEO = bullshit’ then here are a few pitfalls to bear in mind if you’re considering using SEO as a way to bring your products to market.”

If you spend any time on SEO, you’re aware that even though Twitter uses insidious nofollow links it nevertheless impacts search results. Pete Hollier explains how authority and relevancy on Twitter affects search.

Bill Gassett explains how Google is incorporating social signals into search results. His bottom line: “Having connections, followers, friends at the various social media sites such as Twitter, Friendfeed, and others is going to help your SERP placement!”

Naming your files in a more intelligent and strategic fashion than simply products.html or image0498.jpg is not only helpful for SEO but also more intuitive for human visitors. This post explains how to use file naming for both optimization and good, solid web design purposes.

Who knew the humble footer could be so powerful? Here’s a great explanation of how bottom-of-the-page real estate can be capitalized on to improve the user experience, enhance indexing, connect with visitors through social media and more.

SEO requires more than just geek talent. Danny Wong makes the case for why successful SEOs also need other talents including (perhaps most importantly) patience: “You also need to understand that your rankings in the SERPS will not always change overnight.”

For those who found Eric’s post above just a bit too much to get through, Rand Fishkin provides a clever summary in illustrated cartoon format. Kind of like the Classics Illustrated comic book series (for those old enough to remember them). Rand’s post may miss a little of Eric’s detail but it’s much more fun.

In this cleverly written and creatively illustrated post, Jaamit Durrani details common SEO mistakes such as over-reliance on the home page and ignoring long tail key phrases. One minor quibble: SEO isn’t a “campaign,” it’s a continual effort.

Wondering how to get more of your site’s pages into Google’s index? Or how useful article submission sites really are for improving your site’s search ranking? Amit Agarwal publishes a highly informative, straight-from-the-horse’s-mouth interview with several members of Google’s search quality team that answers these questions and many more.

Normally a title like this would trigger my mental spam alert, but this is from Glen Allsop, so it’s legit. He describes how to use the fact that 20-25% of Google searches every single day are brand new and combine it with event news and trending topics (from Google Trends) to capitalize on these high volume, low competition searches to potentially generate large amounts of search traffic.

Dave McAnally outlines 10 ways that companies often sub-optimize their web presence, such as managing social media activities independently from search, confusing real-world competitors with true competition in search, and implementing a CMS without applying best practices in SEO.

The Beginner’s Guide to SEO by SEOmoz
***** 5 Stars
Must reading for anyone involved in SEO. This is an extensive but rich guide to optimizing websites, written in clear language, covering everything from how search engines work and the basics of search-friendly web design to common SEO myths and using metrics to track SEO results.

Rebecca Wright provides a concise nine-item checklist for optimizing keywords, code, content, images and links. Though written with ecommerce sites in mind, this is a good basic checklist for any site.

“Dr. Pete” Meyers presents his 10 favorite Matt Cutts YouTube videos, addressing topics like the importance of the meta keywords tag (per Matt: “I wouldn’t spend even 0 minutes on it, personally”), the impact of dofollow comments on blogs (moderate comments!) and an admission by Matt that “Good content is necessary, but not sufficient” (with a more detailed explanation in his video).

Learn How Google Works: in Gory Detail by PPC Blog
***** 5 Stars
This phenomenally popular infographic (5,756 tweets as of the time of this writing) precisely what happens between the time you post content to the web and the moment someone first finds it on a Google Search. It also includes trivia like the fact that Google has 36 data centers worldwide that cost up to $600 million each.

An outstanding compendium of SEO tips from internal linking and optimized page titles to writing quality blog comments as part of a link-building effort and avoiding Javascript links (or at least duplicating them with HTML links in the page footer).

Huh? Doesn’t duplicate content (almost) rank up with their with link buying as an SEO no-no? Not necessarily. John Hargrave presents a case study on how a great piece of content, duplicated word-for-word on a popular website, went “megaviral” boosting search engine rank and traffic for both the original and duplicated content site.

A sudden drop in search traffic can cause heartburn for any website owner. Instead of reaching for the Prevacid, check out this post where Jill Whalen outlines a nine-step process for determining the cause of the decline and then rectifying it. One familiar example: “Review and filter out ‘brand’ traffic. Most websites get a lot of Google traffic from people who’ve typed some version of the name of their company as their search query…If you receive fewer visitors for your brand, this could be caused by a decrease in marketing and advertising.”

Gord Hotchkiss muses about how a truly effective SEO strategy needs to reflect overall corporate strategy, noting that “SEO tactics that are grounded in the day-to-day business and the strategic objectives of the company will always outperform the ‘links for hire’ and ghostwriter content creation that still flourishes in this business. Is it easy? Hell no. Is it worth it? I believe so.”

Rand Fishkin (geez, this guy almost needs his own “best of” post) defines six levels of SEO knowledge, then walks through six training methods (e.g., free online guides, published books, conferences) and explains who can benefit most from each method and a ballpark estimate of the time required.

Ian Lurie supplies a handy two-page (what a human visitors sees and what a search engine sees) PDF cheat sheet for on-page SEO tactics, from proper placement of in-text links and inclusion of image alt tags to use of external Javascript files and good semantic markup. A lot of great info packed into a compact document.

Ray “Catfish” Comstock explores the impact of personalization and localization on search results and advises SEOs to focus on average rank per Google Webmaster tools and optimize for “share of voice” rather with than an obsessive focus on top search spots.

How to measure SEO for maximum impact by iMedia Connection
***** 5 Stars
Don’t let the title fool you into thinking this is just a post about analytics. John Faris describes in concise yet comprehensive fashion how to create actionable search ranking reports then act on the data to increase productive traffic through content gap analysis, behavioral keyword targeted, competitive link analysis and other tactics.

Rand Fishkin (again!) confesses via Danny Dover to five SEO mistakes his group has made over the years. #2 is indeed a bad one. #3 still seems like a good idea, especially if it improves the human user experience.

And finally…if the resources above aren’t enough to sate your appetite for SEO knowledge, grab a cup of coffee and a comfortable chair. Marty Weintraub shares his team’s “list of over 1,500 search industry articles, ideas, tweets, tool reviews, notes, snippets and snark” they use to stay current on SEO practices and trends. This is a remarkable list of resources from experts like David Harry, Rand Fishkin (what a shock), Jill Whalen and Debra Mastaler.